SŌLSTITIUM
by Archedes
Summary: Axel was fire, except when he was not, and those sunlight eyes made Roxas think of killing things; of poison ivy and the radioactive sludge from his comic books that corrupted and abstracted the hair from the scalp and gave death in place of powers. / Akuroku AU


It was the dog days of summer, when the grass yellowed and curled away from the sun and the cats hid under their Missouri porches and the dragonflies shot across the breeze like iridescent darts, the sun caught in their wings. The lake was a violent green thick with algae and blind fish; the surface was still, and the bobs of their lines floated with sterile serenity as their dead hooks remained untouched. The boat was sinking at the pace of a languid afternoon fuck and was twice as unremarkable to the two men who had eyes only for the pulsing veins beneath the bruised skin of their necks. Axel was a wall, and Roxas was a child aching to see beyond, craning up on the tips of his toes as his fingers reached for the edge so that he might pull himself over: if only he stretched a little more, a little higher, he might see what it was that Axel so desperately hid from him. But as always, when they fought of things other than the empty milk carton in the fridge and the way Roxas stuck his cold feet between Axel's thighs, Roxas was a seven year old boy trying to stare into the sun and Axel was this horrible, blinding light that burned too fast and too hot to ever be safe, though it was not for a lack of trying.

This was not the first time Roxas was struck by the creeping and cold suspicion that Axel was hiding something from him, and as the murky water rose up around his feet, soaked through his ratty sneakers until his toes were saturated in sweat and lake, he did not relent, though the part of him that wanted everything to be all right desperately wished to let it all be forgotten. Axel's eyes were bright, and like the sun it was hard to look at them, especially now when he stared back like a formaldehyde-frozen corpse (and Roxas could not help but think that it was undeniably wrong for such an expressive face to be so cold and hard). Axel was fire, except when he was not, and those sunlight eyes made Roxas think of killing things; of poison ivy and the radioactive sludge from his comic books that corrupted and abstracted the hair from the scalp and gave death in place of powers.

They were in Missouri because Axel said they needed a break from the coast, and his uncle owned a farm so was there really any better place to seek asylum than amidst the miles and miles of rice paddies and corn fields where only the coyotes and possums could hear you scream? They were fishing because that's what boys did during these hot country summers, and they dug up worms and caught dragonflies the size of ballpoint pens for bait. All the while, Roxas was angry and frustrated, and he was sick of being angry and frustrated; Axel—a man of habit and hope who followed routines and wished for same actions to produce different results—tried to mend a broken leg with a band-aid and the only difference this time was that a thousand-mile trip to the Show-Me State was uncharacteristically elaborate and departed from a box of half-eaten apology chocolate. Maybe he thought that if he tried to bring back their childhood, Roxas would forgive or forget or stop sleeping on the couch every night because he couldn't look at Axel's face first thing in the morning anymore, when those radioactive eyes would wash over him and scald his flesh with remembrance of the things Axel would not say.

He had been a later addition to Roxas's life; Roxas had grown up in a small suburban town in upstate New York, and the only friend he had cared to keep was a small girl named Xion who read Sartre and kept necklaces made from seashells that she wove with an almost religious devotion, though he never once caught her wearing them. By the time he was fourteen, he was convinced he would marry her, and she would be happy and no longer joke about how she was waiting for her Godot because she didn't think Roxas had read it and he had never had the heart to correct her (Roxas would never say aloud how existentialism tore him apart from the outside in if he ever stopped to let it, and he wondered on rainy days when she curled up at the foot of his bed—her legs draped across his, _The Stranger_ sitting in her lap—if it tore her apart too). Her father drank and it made him mean, but Xion didn't know that Roxas had heard him screaming and cursing from the sidewalk on the way to Sunday school one afternoon. Xion came outside, and when she saw Roxas, she smiled like she lived an enchanted life and wanted for nothing.

When they were fifteen and blessed with two and a half months of a free summer, they met a wild-eyed boy with hair that looked like fire, and it seemed to almost come alive whenever the light hit it from just the right angle. It was the longest day of the year, and the sun seemed to stand still in the sky above and pour down onto them the type of heat that infected the heart with a volatile agitation. The first conversation Axel and Roxas ever had was an argument; Axel insisted sea salt ice cream was disgusting and Roxas insisted his hair looked like a porcupine's ass. Xion, at the time, had laughed until she was in stitches, clutching her stomach as tears squeezed out of the corner of her eyes—blue, like the ocean of Meursault.

"All right, all right," Axel had finally conceded, hands up palms out with that cocky curl to his lips that Roxas would quickly learn to roll his eyes at. "I'm a fair guy, okay? Tell you what: how 'bout we meet here every day at sundown, and I'll eat your crappy ice cream until I like it. Deal?" And Axel said this with the easy conviction of a boy who believed they were friends already.

By the end of August, Axel claimed he had seen the light and been thusly converted to the Church of Sea Salt, and Roxas was too busy rolling his eyes to see the way Axel grimaced every time he took a bite.

Axel was a city boy visiting family for the summer, and on the fifth of September he was due to return home to Manhattan. He ruffled Xion's hair and kissed the top of Roxas's head because it made him scowl and blush and consequentially scowl harder before punching Axel in the arm hard enough to bruise. Then he left them, leaving behind a promise to return the next summer and a smell of rum on the air because he had gotten into his grandfather's liquor again. Once, he had offered to share with the two of them; Xion had refused, and Roxas followed along, still half in love even after three years of red-dusted cheeks and childish compliments stuttered through chapped lips. Xion was round-faced and speckled with acne, and Roxas was gangly—all arms and legs—and wore bright purple-banded braces because once upon a time it had been Xion's favorite color.

When he was sixteen, his braces gone and his frame only just beginning to harden with the onslaught of maturity, he had somehow summoned the nerve to finally ask her on a date. Halfway through dialing her number, laughing nervously at how much trouble he was having remembering it, there was a city-wide blackout and his courage died along with the lights, stuck trembling in his chest beneath a thick, mucus layer of raw frustration at his own impotence. Two months later, she was dating another boy who held her hand through her furious blushing and gave her flowers in the school halls, where everyone could see and whisper to one another how sweet they were.

Roxas found out a week after that, when Axel had tried and failed to drag him into the movie theater twenty minutes early and Roxas saw the two of them together by the concession stand.

They drifted apart, and Roxas stayed inside more, face down in his darkened bedroom, wrapped in a cocoon of blankets with cartoon planes zipping around on them. He stopped meeting for ice cream, and only Axel came knocking on his door, sweet-talking Roxas's mother into letting him inside where he flopped next to Roxas on his bed, propping up his mud-caked boots on the clean sheets, smudging the tiny faces of the planes. Axel did not allow himself to be ignored.

"You gonna stay in here all summer?" Roxas could hear the smirk on his lips, and he seethed. "C'mon man. You can't hide in here forever."

"She hates me," Roxas mumbled plaintively into his pillow, immediately regretting the words the moment they left his mouth, and he prayed a futile prayer that Axel did not hear.

"She doesn't _hate_ you. She's just confused about why you're actin' this way. You punched out her boyfriend, y'know. Doesn't really help the 'everything's fine' bullshit you've been trying to shove on us for the past two weeks." Right now, the only person Roxas felt like punching out was Axel.

Roxas remained obstinately silent—petulant and petty and spiteful to the last, because he knew Axel was trying to make him feel better and he also knew that since Roxas's jealousy and heartache had driven Xion away, Axel had filled in the hole Roxas had left in her. "_Roxas_," Axel coaxed, and he was met with silence. "…You're a real stubborn guy."

Eventually, Axel's grandmother called for him, and he went home but not before rolling Roxas off of his bed. "You better show up tomorrow, man. Don't make me drag you out there," he had laughed the words to the sliver of Roxas's face that peeked through the sheets—an angry blue eye glaring between the red wings of the planes. Then he was gone and the present moment replaced him.

It was summer again, but Roxas was twenty, Axel twenty-four, and they were sitting in a sinking boat out in the middle of a Missouri lake. The water was up to Roxas's ankles. "Don't hide things from me," he repeated, refusing to look away though his chest felt like it was in a vice from the way Axel was staring at him. Roxas had never felt so small, so insignificant. It was an acid bath with his eyes open and if he cried out in pain, he would lose this unforgiving game that would not give him the chance to lose twice.

"I'm looking out for you. I didn't know that was a fucking crime," Axel said coldly, and Roxas winced despite himself as the ice grazed him.

"No, you _hide_ things from me because you think I can't handle it. I'm not a kid anymore." Roxas's anger was a kind that came all at once—a sensory overload that flooded his veins with fire. It reddened his cheeks and brought tears to his eyes, and that only made him angrier because the humiliation of crying right now would be too much. So he balled his hands into fists and bit his tongue and battered back the hot tears until he tasted blood.

Axel was the one who looked away first, and Axel was the one to finally acknowledge the boat. "Let's get outta here, man."

"No, we're gonna finish this right now," Roxas insisted, his voice rising and his heart beating in his temples and he had to do it now or he would lose his nerve like the night of the blackout, and Axel—like Xion before him—would slip through Roxas's fingers like the wisps of vanilla smoke from those expensive cigars Axel used to steal from his grandfather.

"We'll be finishing it at the bottom of the goddamn lake. Jesus Christ. If this is about the other day—"

"It's _not_," Roxas hissed, embarrassed and angry all at once in a way that caused him to surge to his feet. Had the boat not capsized at that moment, he convinced himself that he would have broken Axel's nose.

The world turned upside-down, and he thought he was drowning as cold lake water rushed into his mouth and nose, to his lungs where it chased the air out in fat bubbles. Instinct came alive and forced his legs to kick, but something kept him under and his hands scrabbled futilely for the surface. The boat. The boat was sinking and he couldn't see and this was the blackout, coming back for him four years later because losing Xion wasn't enough even though the only thing that had ruined them was Roxas's cannibalizing regret.

The night of his eighteenth birthday was the first time Roxas got drunk. After his mother had left to work the graveyard shift at the hospital, Axel had showed up at his door bearing two large brown paper bags and that cocky grin that scrunched the tattoos beneath his eyes that were still red around the edges where they hadn't yet healed. Roxas and Xion had needled him endlessly about _why_ he would get them on his face, of all places, and he had enigmatically responded with, "They're for a friend," and refused to say anymore on the matter.

Inside of the bags were bottles and cans of all types of liquor—most of which Roxas did not recognize and several which he could not pronounce. By the time he sampled everything—with Axel's bullying becoming increasingly enthusiastic proportional to the amount of empty beer cans laying at his feet—Roxas's head was swimming and he was finding it difficult to remain sitting upright in his father's leather La-Z Boy that squeaked loudly every time he righted himself. Axel was speaking; the words were a rapid-fire garbled mess rendered indecipherable by Roxas's sluggish brain, and he could do no more than stare bleary-eyed at the man sprawled out on the ridiculous Persian rug, his legs hooked at the knees over the seat of the sofa, the soles of his socked feet digging into the back. His hands were a blur of motion, animated in broad sweeps that might have unbalanced him had he not already been flat on his back on the floor of Roxas's living room.

Roxas just laughed, and maybe nothing was funny at all but the alcohol was pumping red hot through his limbs and tickling his chest and he felt _okay_. The room shuddered now and then, and his head felt like it was made of lead, but he could think of Xion—her eyes, her smile, the way she would conduct daily battles with her mother over every animal she found and insisted was homeless and needed her love—without that familiar empty pang striking hard against his ribcage, a blunted battering ram aiming to smash his heart until there was nothing left. But for the moment, the liquor filled him up, and he could think of her and laugh and he scarcely noticed that Axel had moved until he was there, hands braced on Roxas's knees as he leaned over him, the laughter dying in Roxas's throat as Axel's whiskey breath enveloped him in the short interval before he pressed his lips to Roxas's and forced them open with his tongue in a way that sent the room spinning in a bourbon haze.

Axel's body weighed down on him, hands drunkenly groping, fingers digging sharply into his hips, and all Roxas could think about was the times Axel would ruffle Xion's hair and kiss the top of his head and the time Xion had almost drowned because her foot had gotten stuck in the broken bottom rung of her pool ladder. He clawed at Axel's chest, fists knotting the front of his jacket because he, too, was drowning and he felt the chair buck dangerously beneath them. At the hospital, Axel had shown up with flowers and claimed they were from Roxas, and by the time Roxas had gotten off of work and gone to see Xion, her face was overflowing with a joy that her smile could scarcely contain, and just like that the years of estrangement melted away though his heart still ached when her boyfriend came an hour later. Axel left marks on his neck from the angry edge of his teeth, but Roxas's Malibu thoughts were of Xion.

One of them ended it—Roxas could never remember who, except that his elbows had been locked at the sharp angle where his fingers were wrapped tightly around the teeth of Axel's jacket zipper, and the marks they left were still there in the morning. He remembered Axel sitting on the floor at his feet, sweat beading his brow as he breathed like a man who hadn't tasted air in years. Roxas was still in the chair, slouched and limp as his wide eyes switched between the ceiling and a spot near Axel's shoulder as he vainly tried to make sense of it all like the day in the hospital when Xion insisted on thanking him for the flowers he didn't remember bringing.

The next day, Roxas was home with what he told his mother was a stomach virus, and he didn't hear from Axel until eventually—fed up with the way the bile and confusion rose up and burned his throat—Roxas called only to be told by Axel's grandfather that he had gone back to Manhattan a week early, driving out in his shitty '76 Mustang that would have been a nice car if Axel ever cared to care about it. The night was a blur, but Roxas vividly remembered that his senior year of high school was riddled with missed calls and voicemails, like a dying cat being eaten alive by parasites come early. It was slowly killing him, and though he laughed and smiled and reveled in the sea-blue of Xion's eyes, many days he retreated to his dark room where he laid face down on his bed and wondered what he would even say to Axel if given the chance to say anything at all. Roxas had never dwelled on his own sexuality, but what he knew for certain was that Axel was the best friend he had and the thought of losing him made his breath hitch in the cold grip of the anxiety that invariably settled like a noose around his neck.

After eight months of silence, one day in May Axel showed up on Roxas's doorstep, hair askew and mouth crooked into his cocky smile as he stood on the front porch, insouciance dripping from his person as he fished a cigarette from his pocket and shoved it unlit between his lips. It was a Saturday morning, and Roxas opened the door in his boxers and a T-shirt and though the kids across the street were playing in a sprinkler on their front lawn, Roxas still walked out, balled his hand into a fist, and socked him square in the jaw, sending the cigarette crashing to the ground where it rolled off the porch and into Roxas's father's rosebush. He had been happy, though he didn't smile—when he opened the door to a familiar mess of red hair, he was overwhelmed with a relief that brought tears to his eyes. But the way Axel looked as though nothing had happened, as though he hadn't spent over half a year avoiding him, was too much, and on an impulse Roxas hit him a second time, though this one to the shoulder, and it lacked the raw conviction of the first.

"This is the welcome I get?" Axel sputtered out, rubbing his jaw with one hand and his shoulder with the other, arms crossed against his chest.

"It's been eight months, you asshole."

"I was busy. You know how it is, bein' an adult in a working world." Axel shrugged it off in a way that made Roxas want to hit him again, but before he could Axel was nudging him aside and walking into the house, where he poured himself a bowl of cereal like he used to when they were kids. Roxas stood there in the doorway, dumbly watching, and all he could think was that Axel was back and whatever happened didn't matter so much anymore.

For two years, they entered a normalcy that was only uneasy when Axel forgot not to touch him—they never spoke about it, though Roxas could no longer bear the innocent nudges or the way Axel ruffled his hair without thinking that there was _more_. Whenever Axel caught himself, he laughed and took back his hand and spoke of Missouri.

Roxas found himself on his back, soaked and staring up at a clear blue sky and the banner hanging from the back of a plane that was advertising toothpaste, and the only thing on his mind was the way the dirt from the lakeshore was ruining the back of his favorite t-shirt. He sat up and was hit with a vertigo that almost flattened him once more if it wasn't for the steadying hand on his shoulder, and for a few seconds Roxas forgot that he was angry. "You all right?" Axel did not have a voice capable of gentility, but it was thick with a concern that was comforting in the way it transcended the way Roxas's shoulders shook slightly.

"Fine," he said shortly as he remembered himself, shoving Axel off unsteadily getting to his feet where he wobbled twice before steadying.

The trip back to the car was silent, and Roxas soaked the passenger seat of the Mustang as they drove off—if Axel was going to do something about the boat, Roxas neither knew nor cared. He sat hunched against the door, face pressed against the window as the farmlands raced by, and the only sound was the hum of the engine and the rumble of the road beneath the tread of the tires. Occasionally, when his self-control faltered and he couldn't help himself, Roxas glanced over to Axel—each time he was met with the rough line of his profile as he stared straight ahead, knuckles white as he gripped the steering wheel.

They moved in together just before the beginning of Roxas's third year of college—when the aid ran out and he could no longer afford to live on campus, Axel had come and offered to let Roxas move in, words slipping out through that cocky grin that knew the answer before the question had even been asked. Axel worked from home as a columnist to an online newspaper, and Roxas drove his shitty Mustang to his classes along with shopping lists that often contained scattered bits of Axel's peculiar humor, such as "eye of newt" and "virgin's blood" nestled amidst "butter" and "extra soft toilet paper".

The nature of their arrangement—which existed only as an amorphous, wordless creature that lacked definition or concretion—was something that Roxas purposely avoided; what he knew for certain was that he lived with Axel, and together they floated in the abyss that existed between "best friends" and _more_. Roxas ignored it, mostly, even on days when he felt utterly lost within his own life and found solace in the curve of Axel's collarbone where the words were insignificant and Axel—where he laid out on the couch, one arm tossed over his eyes because he hit a snag in his article or a deadline was coming much too quickly—would just put a hand on the small of his back and let Roxas bury his face in the crook of his neck, hands fisted tight in the collar of Axel's shirt because he never knew where to put them and feeling the fabric crushed between his fingers grounded him against the way Axel's body heat enveloped him.

They kissed sometimes, and it was bruising and brutal and lacked the romance the movies had promised him. Axel was an overwhelming force, and Roxas often found himself carried away in the hurricane winds. Sometimes girls—and guys, though it was far rarer—from class would invite Roxas out, to the movies to the pizzeria to the New Jersey boardwalk that was a thirty minute train ride from the New York City campus, and awkwardly Roxas would decline because it felt too intimate and always at the back of his mind was the heavy sound of Axel's breathing as he slept, an arm wrapped around Roxas's waist and his forehead pressed to the back of his neck, his feet sticking out over the edge of the mattress.

Eventually the rolling countryside began to slow, and Roxas—unaware that he had even fallen asleep—roused to see nothing but train tracks to one side and endless cornfields to the other. "Why are we stopping?" he asked groggily, having once again forgotten that he was angry. Axel, however, did not.

"We're not," Axel muttered, his voice thick with unspent annoyance as the engine gave one final shudder before dying, leaving them to coast to a stop on the side of the dirt road, the passenger side abreast of the cornstalks that just managed to clear the top of the Mustang. Swearing under his breath, Axel kicked open his car door and stood, slamming it shut so hard that the entire car shook. "Pop the hood, would you."

"You don't know anything about cars."

"Just pop the damn hood."

With a scoff, Roxas complied before climbing over into the driver's seat and getting out. The road was empty, and on the horizon he could catch a glimpse of the pinkening sky over the tops of the trees where the sun had begun to set. Not far from where they were broken down, Roxas could see a sign marking a city limit: Fisk, pop. 342. A small blip of a town that wasn't even marked on the old Missouri map Axel had crumpled up in the glove compartment.

"_Fuck_," Axel hissed suddenly, ripping back his hand from where he had been tinkering under the hood, and he clutched it to his chest as he poured a long string of curses down onto his work boots. "You gotta be kidding me…"

"We need to go."

"_Where_? You think that little backwater town has a hotel? Man, it probably doesn't even have a goddamn police station."

"Then what the hell are we supposed to do, Axel? Sleep in the car?"

"Just give me a minute to think."

"What aren't you telling me?"

Axel's head snapped to the side, and all over again those harsh, unforgiving eyes were fixed on Roxas. Anger welled up inside of him—all at once, a flood of raw feeling. "Roxas—"

"_No_. _Listen_. I'm not a kid. I don't need you protecting me. I don't need you _lying_ to me about things that are important! I thought we were best friends—"

"We _are_—"

"—won't even tell me what's going on anymore. I can't live like this."

"Fine. What do you want to do? Joe from downstairs isn't actually an 'Unusual Perfume Salesman', all right? He's a pot dealer."

"You know what I mean."

"No, I really don't, Roxas."

"Xion. What's going on with _Xion_ that you're not telling me? I know you know."

"God, it's always about her, isn't it?"

"What's _that_ supposed to mean?"

"Nothing. Not a thing."

"Why do you always have to be this way? Why can't you just tell me the truth—"

"She's leaving, all right? She wanted to tell you herself, but she just didn't know how."

"…What?" It had been nearly five years since the night of the blackout when he had let Xion slip through his fingers, when he had let their friendship fall through the cracks because he couldn't choke down his own feelings. Things had changed—they weren't kids anymore, they didn't have the luxury of sweltering summers and melting ice creams on days when the sun stood still and the heat blanketed their backs where they sat on the clock tower that Axel had convinced them to sneak into when they were fifteen. "Where is she going?"

"California. That boyfriend of hers you love so much proposed, you know? She's moving to be with him, transferring to some university over there or something."

He gripped his temples, fingers lacing through his hair until his skull throbbed between his hands because this was the end. Xion was leaving him behind, although he had always thought she had done it a long time ago. But now it was permanent. She would get married, have kids, and he would be the same kid from New York with too many feelings crammed inside his head than he knew what to do with, who swaddled his heartache with sheets and little red planes that still bore the stains from Axel's boots. He felt two hands on his shoulders, though there was nothing gentle in the way he could feel the nails biting through his shirt. "What did you think would happen?" Axel asked softly.

"I didn't…I…"

"It's time to grow up, man. You do the best you can when you can, and then you have to let go when it's not enough."

"It's my fault…"

"…Yeah, it is. Come on." An arm slipped around Roxas's shoulders, and he was pulled forward. Slowly, he lowered his hands from his head, and they hung limply at his sides as he allowed himself to be led by Axel towards Fisk. "I'm sorry, all right?"

"…All right."

"All right. Now cheer up, would you? You can always crash the wedding; get stupid drunk and punch out her boyfriend. Again. For old time's sake."

"_Axel_."


End file.
